Leslie Purnell Davies is an author truly deserving of the ‘cult’ epithet. Not just for the two dozen novels and sixty or so short stories that have garnered him a small but dedicated following over the last 50 years or so; but also because, not long after bursting on the literary scene, he almost as quickly turned his back on it to become seemingly as elusive and mysterious as one of his protagonists. After an intense period of activity in the 1960s and early 70s, which saw him achieve a small measure of success in both the mystery and science fictions genres, Davies stepped back in the shadows and left his creative life behind – to be rediscovered by intrepid readers picking up copies of his books in second-hand bookshops. One publisher looking to reprint his work eventually had to hire a private detective to track him down, but found only a grave on foreign soil for his troubles. This is all well in keeping with Davies’ own fiction, which deals with identity, aberrant states of mind and loss of control. This is particularly true of Man Out of Nowhere, also published in the US as Who is Lewis Pinder?, his second novel and one of his most ingenious.

The novel is set in 1960 in a small village not far from Nottingham in the north of England. One night an emaciated man, wearing a brand new suit but no shoes, is found unconscious in Pinder Lane. Taken to the Lewis Ward of the local hospital, doctors quickly conclude that the man, suffering from extreme malnutrition and atrophied muscle tissue, is an amnesiac. His clothes offer no identification and even the suit, while pristine, turns out to have been made by a tailor that perished in the Blitz twenty years before. The man, named ‘Lewis Pinder’ by the staff, has only two distinguishing characteristics: a scar behind his right knee and a distinctive clover-shaped birthmark on his left shoulder blade.

The case is put in the hands of young CID sergeant Roger Fenn, who learns that for several hours there were no cars in the vicinity of the lane where the man was found and that, given his weakened condition, ‘Pinder’ couldn’t have walked very far on his own – and yet no one in the village has any idea who he is or how he got there. Fenn surmises that ‘Pinder’ must have come from the nearby home of Mr Lomford, an elderly man who just buried his wife and who was also recently hospitalised after a stroke at her funeral. Matters appear to be cleared up when Lomford sees the photo of ‘Pinder’ in the paper and claims that the man is actually Clive, his son – the only problem being that his son died twenty years earlier, in the war. Then an elderly school teacher contacts the police and insists that the man with the scar and the distinctive birthmark is actually John Tebutt, an ex-student of his – only he also died before the War. ‘Pinder’ is then positively identified again, from an unimpeachable source this time, as RAF pilot Peter Blanchard – but he also died in a plane crash near the village, again during the war. Then a man comes back from America and also claims to know the true identity of ‘Pinder’, this time saying that he is in fact his long-lost brother Clifford Wolton, also reported dead many years before! How can so many seemingly reputable people have such completely different opinions as to who Pinder is, and how can all of these men have had the same distinguishing birthmark and scar? Fenn’s case seemingly cannot get any more complicated, but then Lomford is stabbed to death in the hospital, a series of fires by an apparent pyromaniac break out around the village, and before the climax there is a kidnapping and then a second murder.

Davies litters the book with symbols and images that explore the fragmented and fractured nature of the ‘Pinder’ identity, so that even his level-headed (and frankly, rather dull) young hero Fenn starts to have his doubts about what is happening to the world he is now inhabiting as he gets mixed up in a complex web of intrigue involving murder and espionage with its roots in pre-war Nazi Germany:

Roger stared at the mirror and the crack that broke the drawn face of a stranger into two separate segments

Amnesia is of course a common and popular theme in detective fiction, as in the movies – one need only think of such examples as Margery Allingham’s Traitor’s Purse, Peter Duluth’s identity crisis in Patrick Quentin’s Puzzle for Fiends or in several noir stories by Cornell Woolrich including the classic The Black Curtain. Davies was a writer, like his near contemporary Philip K Dick, obsessed with exploring existential themes around Cartesian conceptions of mind/body dualism and frequently used delusional frameworks or science fiction trappings to explore his character’s sense of psychological, physical or temporal unease. Amnesia, brainwashing and variants on the theme of memory and personality displacement became recurring themes to an extraordinary and fascinating extent in Davies’ fiction. Even if the prose style is unexciting, the characterisation rather plain and the continual return to a small village ambience repetitive, there is no denying the force and originality of Davies’ clever plots and ideas.

Some of Davies’ books, like Man Out of Nowhere, are straight mysteries, albeit here a whodunit spliced with a story of wartime espionage, while others, such as Psychogeist (1966) and The Artificial Man (1965) – which were combined and filmed by William Castle as Project X (1967) – while beginning in naturalistic fashion and contemporary settings, eventually shift into the SF genre. One notable example of SF in his works, Twilight Journey (1967), about a mind control technique known as ‘senduction’
in which people can be inserted and then extracted from a dream state has a strong resemblance to the recent movie blockbuster Inception. Some of his books and short stories were published under the pseudonym Leslie Vardre and it is of course quite appropriate that Davies should have worked under several names and ‘personalities’. He in fact published fiction as several different people, including: Leo Barne, Robert Blake, Richard Bridgeman, Morgan Evans, Ian Jefferson, Lawrence Peter, Thomas Phillips, GK Thomas and Rowland Welch. Davies’ main achievement may well have been this fusion of different genres and in his Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (2nd edition, 1999) John Clute has said that,

“LPD has in a sense founded a new generic amalgam: tales whose slippage among various genres is in itself a characteristic point of narrative interest, with the reader kept constantly suspense about the generic nature of any climaxes or explanations to be presented”

Davies deliberately creates unease in his fiction through his melding of genres, often to extremely cunning effect. In The Alien (1968) for instance, the protagonist comes to believe that he is in fact a creature from another planet, but the truth proves much more complex. The central conceit, and little else, was adapted for the exciting and underrated futuristic spy thriller, The Groundstar Conspiracy (1972).

Man out of Nowhere is a straight mystery completely removed from the science fiction genre – the final explanation of how one man with such distinctive physical characteristics could be positively identified as four different people, all of whom were believed dead, is explained with rigorous logic and, in the words of critic ST Joshi from The Evolution of the Weird Tale (2004),

” … it would be criminal to reveal the ingenious and thoroughly satisfying solution to this novel.”

Davies’ prose is simple and full of commonplace turns of phrase and he certainly lacks the ambition and grandeur of a more serious novelist like the more rightly celebrated Philip K. Dick. But Davies was a dedicated craftsman, even if he was only ever a part-time writer before retiring to live in Tenerife at the end of his career in the mid 1970s (a couple of lesser novels followed). His stated aim was simply to entertain – as he put it in his entry for the Twentieth Century Crime & Mystery Authors encyclopedia:

“My first novel, The Paper Dolls, was rejected by four publishers because it didn’t fit into any of their categories. I try to puzzle my readers; I have no axes to grind; I think I have always played fair with my readers when offering them what I hope may seem like an unsolvable mystery. I try to offer entertainment only.”

Davies’ books are well-worth rediscovering – the most recent reprint, the 1972 What Did I Do Tomorrow? comes courtesy of Mr Daniel Caffrey from Trashface publishers who through a private eye were able to piece together some of Davies’ life (and death) – what he unearthed can be read on their website.

Man Out of Nowhere (aka Who Is Lewis Pinder?) would be an excellent place to start for anyone intrigued enough to embark on a heady adventure into the mind of LP Davies and his disjointed characters.

23 Responses to M is for … MAN OUT OF NOWHERE (1965) by LP Davies

I read this one many, many moons ago. So long ago that I didn’t remember a thing about it. Sounds like I need to read it again. I also have What Did I Do Tomorrow? sitting in one of my many TBR stacks….

Hello Bev – it’s a book with a good complicated plot that has a strangely if unexpectedly timely twist at the end. This turned into my longest blog entry ever for a single book but I was surprised at how little coverage of Davies there is out there so I thought I should pack in as much as possible – but I think this has made it seem like a big commitment for a blog entry! Thanks for reading – and good luck with all your Eagle Scout activities.

I’ve never heard of this author or this book and I was reading mysteries during the 60’s and 70’s – jeez. (My only excuse is: well, I can’t read EVERYTHING!) But you’ve made it sound very intriguing. It’s just the sort of thing I’d probably like. Now to try and track the book down somewhere…One more title for my TBR Mountain.

Hi Yvette – well, Davies is a pretty obscure writer it has to be said but he did get most of his stuff published in the US as far as I can tell and initially it probably helped that when this novel was released in the US (as WHO IS LEWIS PINDER?) it did get a very nice write up from Anthony Boucher in the NYT, which you would think might have helped a bit in terms of exposure. I think a lot of his books tended to be marketed as science fiction, even when they really weren’t or it was a bit borderline shall we say. If you do get hold of some of his stuff I really hope you like it!

I read this back in the 1970s when I was a tennager. In that magnificent tribute to the mystery novel, Murder Ink I first learned of this book. Dilys Winn, the editor of Murder Ink, wrote a few articles herself and in one of those pieces she mentioned a handful of undeservedly overlooked, yet brilliant mystery novels worth reading. Who is Lewis Pindar? was one of those overlooked books.

I also like Davies’ dabbling in the occult. The Land of Leys is a personal favorite of mine.

I’m in awe of this article. Thanks so much for giving L.P. Davies a long overdue tribute. And for enlightening me about the new reprint from Trashface. I’m ordering a copy as soon as I’m done typing this.

You ought to join the gang over at pattinase’s blog for the Friday’s Forgotten Book feature. Drop Patti Abbot a line. She’ll welcome your contributions as warmly as she did mine, I’m sure. Always room for one more – just like the hearse coachman says in Dead of Night. ;^D

It’s great to see one of my favourite mystery/SF/unclassifiable writers get more than just a passing mention. It’s criminal that his work is so forgotten. Twilight Journey is probably my favourite of his novels.

L.P. Davies has been one of my favourite writers ever since I read “The Paper Dolls”. read all of of his books as I found them in my local library many years ago.I have, however, found one on the internet” Dimension A”. and found one back home in England under his other nameof Leslie Vadre called “The Nameless Ones”

Hello Elizabeth, thanks for the comments. I envy your library’s stock of Davies novels – took me years to get my collection together! DIMENSION A is one of his more straightforward SF titles that I am slightly less keen on to be honest, while I really likes NAMELESS ONES which for some reason always seems to turn up compared with many other titles that are much tougher to source. But the searching is usually well worth the effort at least.

Thanks to the internet I’ve been able to acquire all the L P Davies novels I hadn’t bought locally. Some I’d never read,some I’d borrowed from the library in the 1970’s. I’ve just reread one of the latter, sadly the last of my TBRs. but saved for the last. This is The Lampton Dreamers, as I thought, one of his best. There’s the village setting of many of the naturalistic thrillers (a little closer than usual to such a village as P M Hubbard’s in Flush as May) plus a supernatural element that aligns it to The Paper Dolls rather than the more overtly scifi novels. This gives the book complexity and suspense, and the suggestion of a psychotic break in one of the main characters does not provide a naturalistic explanation for events but adds to these.
Second only to Man out of Nowhere / Who is Lewis Pinder, I think.

Hello Anne and well done on the LP Davies reading! I think what you ay about the book is spot on – Although there are other Davies novels I prefer a bit to Dreamers, ones that maybe fall more within the SF category (like The Alien and especially the criminally overlooked Twilight Journey), it is definitely a terrific and very typical Davies story (especially the typically well-caught small village setting) – and I like the way that it uses the shared dream plot in a really creative way so that it doesn’t feel like a letdown at the end.

When I was a kid back in the 60s, I joined a science fiction book club. Every month a book arrived in the mail and I could either keep it or return it. I received The Artificial Man by L. P. Davis, but it was summer time and my friends and I were spending a lot of time out riding our bicycles and I never got around to reading it or sending it back (my parents paid for it). A few days ago I was visiting my Mom in Virginia (I live in Florida) and I brought back a few books, including The Artificial Man. I’ve only read the first two chapters but I like it so far. This is a very interesting post because their are so many connections to things I’m interested in, like Philip K. Dick, William Castle, the blending of science fiction and mystery, and the question of identity. Good stuff!

Thanks very much Bill, very kind. It’s a good book as I recall and Project X is pretty faithful (well, up to the end anyway and the introduction of a subplot that ends up being mostly created via limited animation furnished by Hanna and Barbera) though some sources credit the source as being Psychogheist, which is clearly wrong, but in fact on screen it says ‘based on stories by’ so it may have more than one basis (maybe the subplot was derived from some short fiction by Davies – wish i knew …)

He used to submit short stories for the magazine London Mystery Selection. One of them,
Interference , -about a boy in his locked room involved with future alien invasion of earth,
was creepy and sharply written. Very difficult even now to find old editions of London Mystery
Selection- but he was definitely a regular contributor writing as L.P. Davies then.,

Thanks Mark – I have not read any of these but that long list of pseudonyms I quoted was, as I understand it, mostly used for his magazine appearances, most of which do seem to have been for that digest. It would be great pif they could be collected, wouldn’t it?